“... laureate and historiographer royal was vital to him, as was his income as a shareholder in the king’s theatre company. Money was tight after the Theatre Royal burned down in 1672, and again in 1689, when he was sacked from his official posts because he was a Catholic: translating Virgil appealed to him not only for artistic reasons but as a source of ...”

“... that British new music – equally suspicious of European modernism and anything American, whether John Cage or Janis Joplin – wasn’t a club worth joining. Although he had no desire to take up 12-tone composition techniques, Arnold Schoenberg’s music appealed to him intellectually and he engaged with it seriously – in noticeable contrast to Vaughan ...”

“... that good writing could be killed by poor delivery. Richards quotes a poem by the Elizabethan wit John Harington, complaining that someone had read his epigram with ‘point so perverse’ that in the end it seemed ‘neither witty nor a verse’.The formatting choices made by authors and printers are suggestive, but remain open to interpretation. In ...”

“... achieved by subordinating his feelings of ‘just gratitude’ towards Louis XIII. It was that king who had raised the memorialist’s father, his personal favourite for some ten years, to the rank of duke and peer, so we should not be wholly surprised to find Saint-Simon challenging conventional opinion by rating him higher as both person and ...”

“... of America and its role in the world. Currently led, if that is the word, by an infantile would-be king while the future is being forged in Shanghai and Beijing, America may no longer be a serious country. It may even be a laughable one. Yet, as the Swedish diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson writes in his book American Imperatives, ‘the alarming ...”

“... the financial and administrative strains of Charles’s war policy exacerbated relations between King and Parliament during the first five years of his reign, thus demonstrating the disruptive effect of war on Early Modern society which has been elaborated by Michael Howard and other historians. Ashton doesn’t examine the implications of the change in ...”

“... fabulous wealth and bad behaviour that persisted well after his death. In the late 17th century, John Aubrey (who was good on anecdotes though not quite so strong on truth) recorded that he once got one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour up against a tree. She protested with ‘Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last as ...”

“... In a recent TV programme about King George VI, Peregrine Worsthorne commended his late sovereign for being a dull man, brains being the last thing the British constitution requires of a monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull ...”

“... up with the petty feuds of office – which can be as contradictory as they are amusing. When Tom King came in as Secretary of State for Employment over Clark, the junior Minister bridled. He regarded his new master with contempt. This contempt continued until July 1989 when Clark read in the papers that King was to be ...”

“... He was irritated in July 1830 by another revolution in France, which yet again disposed of the king. Worse, there was unrest in Britain. Hay-ricks were set on fire, and threatening messages from ‘Captain Swing’ sent to the owners of the land they were on. The duke and his ministers saw to it that culprits, guilty or not, were hanged or transported to ...”

“... of early biographical hearsay about the playwright which survive, Shapiro is most attracted to John Aubrey’s report that Shakespeare ‘was not a company keeper’ but habitually excused himself from wild nights out on the grounds of ill-health. Shapiro’s hero, though assiduous at keeping up with the news, would rather stay at home at his writing desk ...”

“... In one of John Berryman’s more lucid dream songs (No. 364), there is amusing reference to the reading habits of Henry, the song sequence’s screwed up protagonist: O Henry in his youth read many things he gutted the Columbia – the Cambridge libraries – Widener – Princeton – the British Museum – the Library of Congress but mostly he bought books to have as his own cunningly, like extra wings ...”

“... captains: William West, killed fighting the Powhatans, and Gabriel Archer, an enemy of Captain John Smith, a self-aggrandising swashbuckler and leader of the Virginia Colony. All four died between 1608 or 1610, years remembered as ‘the starving time’, when desperate colonists first ate snakes and frogs, then boots and belts, and finally one ...”

“... consistently and precisely the opposite of what their names say they are: Mr Wise is a dunce, Mr King is a Whig, Mr Coffin’s uncommonly sprightly, And huge Mr Little broke down in a gig While driving fat Mrs Golightly.The lines come to life when they begin to see names less as clues to the characters of their owners – whether faithfully reflected, or ...”

“... title, but in another two years the old devil will be 70 and perhaps he is beginning to mellow. John McDermott remarks in his appealing study of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures. In The folks that live on the hill the hero-as-shit has given ...”